We all like to see big government give the proverbial little guy a break, just as Ohio has done and no doubt will continue to do with Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Amazon — as even the Sentinelese tribe of the Andaman Islands could tell you — is a retail vortex into which increasing numbers of the world's consumers cast their hard-earned dollars, euros and pounds, knowing that two days later, the vortex will belch onto their front stoops a Cuisinart toaster oven or pair of chartreuse scuba fins.

The company is the brainchild of Bezos, a Seattle billionaire and the only mortal with the power to cancel Christmas. Not that he ever would.

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In an announcement that had mayors and economic-development directors swooning across the United States, Bezos revealed on Thursday that he plans to build HQ2, a second headquarters, somewhere in North America. HQ2, which sounds like a bad sequel you might find for free on Prime in the wee hours of Saturday night, would include a $5 billion corporate campus and create as many as 50,000 jobs over 10 or 15 years. The jobs would pay an annual salary of $100,000 or more.

With the company announcement came a list of demands. Columbus meets some of them but is not a perfect fit. When Bezos says the new headquarters would require easy access to mass transit, he isn't talking about COTA's No. 25 bus and the Reynoldsburg Park & Ride.

Amazon said any metro area that has more than a million people, meets its criteria and boasts "a stable and business-friendly environment" should feel free to ask Bezos to the prom. But bidders have to do it by Oct. 19, and by "stable and business-friendly," he means a place that is willing to pin on a boutonniere bursting with tax incentives and other financial roses.

Officials from Ohio and Columbus wouldn't say last week whether they plan to enter this guaranteed scrum among cities, but of course they do. If Amazon's job estimates prove to be anywhere near accurate, why wouldn't you woo HQ2?

Jobs are a good thing, and more jobs are a better thing.

But this willingness to drain the public coffers for private gain is getting old. This isn't some homegrown Ohio startup with a visionary business model but not enough cash to implement it. This is a worldwide megacorporation with plans to deliver packages using swarms of drones that will be launched from enormous, beehive-like structures. If that sounds like hyperbole, look up the company's patent application for its "multi-level fulfillment center for unmanned aerial vehicles."

If a company has the wherewithal to turn a hash-pipe dream like that into reality, it wouldn't seem to require a perpetually burbling fount of tax incentives from cash-strapped states, cities and towns.

Yet Amazon has drunk deeply from that well since it began doing business in Ohio three years ago. The most recent incentives came on Aug. 30, when the Ohio Tax Credit Authority offered a combined $11.6 million in credits for two more Amazon distribution-center projects.

Ask whether this incessant generosity is prudent, and you'll be met with clucks of disapproval and assurances that you "just don't get it." That "it's complicated" and "a great deal."

A $3 billion subsidy package, recently put together by Wisconsin to attract a Taiwanese electronics-manufacturing plant, probably is complicated, too. The promised payoffs are huge, but some critics already have expressed doubts. Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit organization that promotes accountability in economic-development projects, wrote in July that the Wisconsin-Foxconn deal is "a sure loser for Wisconsin taxpayers."

Maybe it's naïve to think these deals should be made on the merits of a place rather than its reputation for greasing corporate palms. As complicated as the arrangements might be, though, they're all starting to feel the same. They all seem to put the interests of giants such as Jeff P. Bezos over John Q. Public.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker

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